Category: DevNation

Recently, the focus on the continuous delivery of value has created a lot of interest in microservices, CI/CD, and containers. The idea is that microservices are small and well defined enough to enable rapid innovation, automated testing, and frequent deployments with minimal risk. This is made possible by adopting continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. CI/CD requires the ability to quickly, easily, reliably, and automatically create and tear down complete execution environments. Linux containers address this need by creating lightweight, portable, and isolated runtime environments. It becomes easy to reach the conclusion that the path to digital transform is continuous value delivery via microservices-based on containers and CI/CD.

Today’s announcement of Red Hat OpenShift.io was followed by a full day of developer toolset Summit sessions. These were presented by the OpenShift.io product development team and covered some truly amazing OpenShift.io features. While there are too many features to cover in a single blog post, these were my top 7 items.

Is this the right dependency to add for the feature that I need to build?

What open source libraries and/or packages are others using?

Is this a stable and secure version?

Does this package’s license conform to my organization’s policies?

These are important questions that developers need to answer when choosing open source software components for their project. It is nearly impossible to deliver a modern application without depending on a number of software packages. It’s hard to justify spending time on the decision process since it doesn’t seem to add any visible business value. However, each component included is a potential liability if it has bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Installing software is a drag

Getting a team set up to work on a new software project can be quite time consuming. You have some great ideas for the code you want to write, but you can’t get down to writing it until you have a development environment for yourself and the rest of the team.

First, you have to select, download, and install tools. There are usually some settings that need to be configured for each one. Then, every other developer on the team needs to do the same thing, and you have to explain it or write up instructions. This is even more challenging if some of your workers are remote or in different time zones.

The more software you install, the more burdensome it is to keep it all up to date. As you update software, you need to make sure the rest of the team keep their environments updated to avoid consistency problems. After adding new versions of software to your environment, any instructions or scripts you wrote for onboarding new team members become out of date.

It’s hard to believe that spring of 2017 is upon us, and with it, the preparation for our second DevNation Federal. Last year has seen a surge of innovation in open source communities, and now more than ever it’s imperative that government agencies equip themselves for the change that lies ahead. This year, digital transformation, microservices, containers and Kubernetes are hotter than ever. Function as a Service (FaaS), hyper-converged, and serverless architecture are on the horizon, and it is open source communities that are driving these technologies at an amazing pace.

Find your sessions. As you search for topics, look at the Application Development track and beyond as you’ll find many additional and relevant sessions in different tracks as well.

Hot topic. Microservices, containers, and cloud are all hot topics right now, so for those of you that want to focus on these, we have a Cloud Native Development Trail Map that will help you focus on 40 sessions, labs, and more.